


Boy Room

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-11
Updated: 2011-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark Mulder and Eric Chavez honestly believe that they are moving on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boy Room

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted December 2004.

Boy Room  
By Candle Beck

There’s a room at the back of the apartment where Eric Chavez lives with his wife. It’s small and has sort of skewed walls, corners all squeezed together into blades, like that, because the building juts out weirdly, and there’s something about heating ducts too, warping the shape of it, turning it into an attic even though it’s just at the end of the main hall.

When they were being shown the place, in the middle of the summer in 2003, Chavez was tired and in a bad mood, because this was probably the seventh place they’d seen that day, and he was sick of looking at bare white walls and varnished wooden mantles, state-of-the-art kitchens with counters as shiny as brand-new dimes, walk-in closets and nooks for entertainment centers, half-bathrooms off the living room, balconies and ornamental fireplaces that couldn’t be used.

The realtor lady was sweeping through with her no-nonsense bustle, waving her hand at the various features and talking mainly to Alex, who nodded and asked good questions and only sometimes looked behind to check that Chavez was still following. Chavez had his hands in his pockets, scowling and kicking at the molding at the base of the wall. His back hurt, the fucking herniated disk was acting up again.

“And this is the solarium,” the realtor lady said, turning smoothly with her fingers spread out to show them. She looked over at Chavez, said with a wide patronizing smile, “That’s ‘sun room,’ Mr. Chavez.”

Alex shot him a glance, because she knew that there wasn’t much of anything that could piss Chavez off faster than people thinking he was stupid. Chavez made fists in his pockets and nodded at the window. “Seems like that gigantic brick building would kinda block any light from getting in here, though.” He showed a big toothy grin.

The realtor lady’s fake smile got wider for a second, cracks stretching in her purpley lipstick, and then she chuckled awkwardly, started talking about how that brick building is only a couple of years old, and the apartment is pre-war, of course, so the solarium name just stuck, but really, it’s a fine open space, just _perfect_ for a study or whatever they might want to use it for.

Chavez tuned her out, tracing around the perimeter of the room, poking at the light switch and the window frame. The realtor lady followed him uncertainly with her eyes, and Alex came over to take his hand and thread their fingers together. Chavez was looking out, his free hand on the frame, the brick building that didn’t even have any windows to spy into, and if he leaned forward he could see down to the edge of the building, where the sun could cut the corner and get through, long and pole-tall. He could see a slice of the eastern hills.

Alex squeezed his hand, and when he looked down at her, she smiled and winked at him. He was, all over again, relieved to be reminded that he did actually love her. This wasn’t just revenge.

*

They ended up taking the apartment. And Chavez got the sun room, the solarium, whatever they wanted to call it. Alex took the second bedroom for her home office, “at least, until . . .” she would say, sliding her hand over his shoulder and curling close to him. He always just smiled and nodded, kissed her so she’d stop talking about that stuff.

Chavez doesn’t mind that the sun can only barely get into the room, when its angle through the crack between the brick building and the apartment is perfect, in a stripe moving across the wall, as thick as a playing card. He likes watching the stripe move for the two hours of the day that it gets through. Likes to feel the warmth on the back of his neck, like four fingers in a flat line.

It became the boy room. That’s what Alex calls it, because Chavez put the Playstation 2 in there, a bunch of junk from the clubhouse, stacks of old scorebooks and six shoeboxes full of baseball cards that he’d had his mom send him once they signed the lease. He used to have more baseball cards than this, he coulda sworn.

It’s where the guys hang out, when they come over, but they don’t come over so much. Chavez doesn’t invite them. It’s weird and they’re too loud and Alex goes to bed pretty early, so.

He spends a lot of time in the boy room, when it’s January and he’s been married for a month and he can’t sleep. And then after the season starts and he’s home by midnight even though Alex never actually asks him to be, he can see it in her eyes. There’s a really long stretch in May that almost breaks him, and he basically moves into the boy room at that point.

He plays video games and keeps the lights off. He plays against the computer, just because, really, what are his options, and after a couple of weeks, he can beat even the highest level with no trouble. He doesn’t get bored with it, though. It’s all right, knowing that he’ll win every time.

Alex never wakes up when he slips out of bed and goes to the boy room. He walks on the outsides of his feet like an Indian, just to be sure. He looks back at the doorway to make sure she hasn’t moved and for some reason the sight of the big bed, mess of blue covers and Alex’s pale hair peeking out, the two bedside tables, makes his throat tight. It’s so entirely adult, having two bedside tables that match. The table on his side, the little drawer is full of bottle caps and balled-up receipts and the stubs of movie tickets.

Sometimes their dog, Tank, lifts his head up off the carpet and blinks at him, huge dog-yawn that looks like he’s unhinging his jaw. Tank never follows him, though, which is good because the floors are hardwood and the dog’s nails click like plastic wind-up toys, big white chattery teeth tottering on yellow sneakers. Tank just looks at him with a bored, mildly irritated look on his face, if dogs can have such complicated expressions, plainly saying, ‘dude, what the fuck are you doing, it’s two in the morning.’ Then he snuffles and goes back to sleep.

Chavez plays video games and it takes him too long to realize that, just like the stripe of the sunlight from one to three in the afternoon, there’s a stripe of moonlight from three to four in the morning, when there’s a moon, dull gray and cold and moving much slower, on the back of his hand, against the cuff of his T-shirt sleeve.

*

Mark Mulder has never really lived alone.

He went straight from his parents’ house to college, and though he could have gotten a single, lived in the dorm for athletes and serious scholarship students (Jock-Dork Hall, they called it), he decided not to. Sophomore year, he lived off campus in a ratty little apartment with three of his teammates. Junior year, they got a new place, not much better than the first, with chewed holes in the baseboards and pipes that clanged loudly in the middle of the night.

Then he got drafted, of course had roommates in the minors, and when he got called up, he immediately corralled some of the guys to find a place in the East Bay. Chavez lived with him that first half year, and was the only one from the first house who moved into the second in 2001.

In the off-season, Mulder goes home to Chicago. Lives with his dad for a little while, lives with the older of his two younger brothers, who’s in graduate school at Northwestern, smart little fucker, for a while longer.

In Phoenix for spring training, he stays with Chavez or Zito, or once, for two weeks in ’02, with Hudson, until he’d gotten kicked out, showed up at Chavez’s hotel room with his duffel bag and a pretty well-formed grudge against any and all right-handed pitchers from Alabama. Mulder’s pretty sure Hudson didn’t like the way his wife was always smiling at him and putting on fresh make-up and offering to make Mulder sandwiches and stuff, but whatever. He’s got some morals, for Christ’s sake. And Hudson could maybe-probably kick his ass, anyway, eight inches shorter or not.

It’s not a thing or anything. It’s not like Mulder _can’t_ be alone. It’s just that he prefers not to be. They’re all in the same situation, or at least most of them are, living in the East Bay for six months of the year and somewhere else for the other six. No real reason not to get a house together. Hell, at least they have the same schedule.

Anyway, he’s gonna get a place down in Scottsdale for the off-season this year, all by himself. There’s a lot of good golfing down there, and it’s where his mom lives now. He’s had enough of the snow and the push of the wind at his back. Had enough being cold. It can get pretty chilly in Arizona at night, but he stays inside. Everything’s very new down there. Still got the cellophane on it.

It wasn’t a big surprise, Chavez moving out. He and Alex got pretty serious pretty quickly. Chavez doesn’t fall in love, he falls off a cliff, and wakes up married. Mulder saw it coming.

Zito started coming around a lot, about that time.

There’s a box of stuff in the hall closet of the Walnut Creek house, the new house for 2004. It’s under a pile of beach towels and old uniform jerseys with rips in the sleeves and buttons missing. The box has three white address stickers on it, Sharpie-black scribbled over the writing. The corner’s torn a little bit, so you have to be careful when you’re picking it up.

Mulder says he doesn’t know who the box belongs to. He shrugs, he says, maybe it’s Menechino’s, he left all sorts of shit. Crosby believes him, because Crosby believes pretty much everything Mulder says. Harden doesn’t, but Harden doesn’t care all that much.

In the box is a warm-up T-shirt with ‘Visalia Oaks’ on the front, no number of the back because it’s just a warm-up shirt. No big deal. A bunch of them who came up through the system played for the Oaks. But it’s the old uniform font, the curved scrolled letters that Visalia retired in favor of a more modern look in 1998. Before Zito was in Class A down there, before Mulder was even out of school.

Also there are some San Diego Padres souvenirs, a red felt pennant from Mt. Carmel High School, and a program from the College World Series in ’98, when USC won it. Cardboard drink coasters from hotels in Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Old baseballs turning yellow and the blue-ink signatures fading along with the red of the stitches. A paperback book with the cover missing, a pulp mystery that was bought in a bus station at some point, off a cheap folding table from a guy with tattoos of Celtic crosses and lions on his arms and neck. A cell phone with a number that doesn’t connect anymore. The starting line-up for the Detroit Tigers, from some day a year or two past, with crazy drawings in the margins and goofy cartoon faces, arrows and exclamation points. Three shoeboxes full of baseball cards chocked into the corners.

Yeah, Mulder’s got no fucking idea whose box this is. Right.

The box moved into the Walnut Creek house at the start of the season in ’04 even though Eric Chavez didn’t. It was in storage with Mulder’s stuff over the off-season, and he didn’t look in it when he shoved it in the back of his car and drove into the hills. He stuck it in the hall closet and doesn’t think too much about it.

*

Eric Chavez and his fiancée signed the lease for their new apartment on an off-day before the Indians came to town, and then Alex kissed him and left to go to a cousin’s wedding in Cielo Negro, a wide spot in the road fifty miles south of Monterey that’s apparently so beautiful you come back from it fundamentally changed.

Chavez went back to the Alamo house, where all his stuff was in boxes, stacked in his room and the front hallway. Zito was on the couch with his bare feet up on the coffee table, his hair damp. He was slumped down with his chin on his chest, looking for all the world like he was asleep.

Chavez searched his pockets for something to throw at him, but there was nothing good, so he had to settle for a penny. He bounced it off Zito’s forehead from the doorway, thinking, ‘shoots he scores!’ and ducked into the hallway before Zito’s eyes came open.

He stopped at his own room, but it depressed him, the bed stripped down to just a tattered blanket and a single pillow, the boxes and empty walls, the curtains drawn because it seemed like one of the things you should do when moving out of a place, leave all the cabinet doors closed and the curtains drawn, get the key from under the doormat and that old can of coffee from the top of the refrigerator. Yeah. Really depressing.

He went down the hallway, and nudged Mulder’s door open without knocking, hoping as always to interrupt something, because they’d been living together for three seasons and he hadn’t walked in on anything yet, and that seemed like a true shame.

Mulder was sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to Chavez, facing the window. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his back was curved, because his head was in his hands. And the sunset came in triangles through the bends of his elbows, sidewalk-glittering off his hair, which was wet too, like Zito’s, and Zito hadn’t been wearing shoes or socks and Mulder wasn’t wearing a shirt.

Mulder’s back moved slightly as he breathed, and Chavez couldn’t tell if he was tired or sad or what. Couldn’t imagine Mulder sad, really. Must be tired.

Chavez said, “Hey,” and Mulder’s shoulders jerked, twisting sharply around. With the melting orange sun behind him, Chavez couldn’t make out his features. Chavez tipped his head against the doorjamb, hooked a thumb in his pocket. “Let’s go.”

Mulder just looked at him for a moment, his face coming into focus as Chavez’s eyes adjusted, and then he nodded, stood up and pulled his shirt back on.

They didn’t look in on Zito in the living room, didn’t leave a note or nothing. There wasn’t much in the house that Zito would want to steal, anyway.

*

They went over to Chavez’s new apartment, stopping to pick up a six pack on the way. They killed one apiece in the elevator, racing each other, cracking and opening their throats and pouring it down, an old game that they’d learned in hotels. It was fourteen floors up, because there wasn’t any thirteenth floor, and that wasn’t a record. They’d done it in ten. Zito once did it in seven, but then threw up in the hallway two steps out, which totally negated the accomplishment. The other beers hung off Mulder’s fingers, the plastic rings hooked tightly.

Chavez figured out the door key from the outside key from the mailbox key, all of them with folds of masking tape around the top, cryptic symbols, and it took him a while to get the thing to turn, the tumblers falling and clacking under his hand.

He led the way down the hallway, and when he got to the open space with the doorway to the kitchen on his left and the doorway to the living room on his right, the light coming from both sides and throwing his shadow straight down, he did the realtor lady’s gesturing twirl, great big fake grin on his face.

“It’s pre-war, don’t you know.”

Mulder smirked, took a long drink of his fresh beer. “The hell you say.”

“True story, man.”

Leaning his shoulder against the wall, Mulder lifted his eyebrows. “Which war, exactly?”

Chavez stopped, looked at him, leaning there all easy and his T-shirt badly wrinkled, crushed up under his ribs. “Didn’t ask.”

He walked over to Mulder and Mulder’s eyes sharpened, narrowed down on him like pinpoints. Chavez started to reach for him and Mulder flinched backwards, nothing he would ever admit to, because Mark Mulder does not flinch, but Chavez saw his shadow move on the wall, the dusting of plaster under his shoulder fanning down to the hardwood floor. Chavez grinned, and pulled a beer off the six pack, turning away and going back down the hall.

“C’mere, I wanna show you this.”

Chavez didn’t look back, but he heard Mulder’s footsteps echoing hollowly. The apartment was big and empty, tunneled hallways and broad unsighted windows, curtains thrown back. It smelled like wet paint and sawdust.

Chavez went into the little room at the end of the hall, with the canted awkward corners and the strip of light, though of course the sun had long since gone down and Chavez didn’t yet know about the moon-stripe that came later. He went right over to the window, angled so that he could see the small view of the hills, unevenly dotted with gold lights.

“This is the sun room. Excuse me. Solarium. Very high-class, I’m sure you could tell.” He grinned over his shoulder. Mulder was standing just inside the doorway, looking oddly smaller than he usually did, the width of his chest less like a superhero’s, all the dumb things Chavez used to think about him. He was working on his beer, and the ones still on the rings twisted gently at his side, brushing his leg.

“Nice,” Mulder said.

Chavez nodded. “Think it’s gonna be my room. I mean, like. Um. Gonna put a couch in here, and a TV, the Playstation and stuff. It’s where we’ll hang out, when you come over. Or. When any of the guys come over.”

He turned back to the window. “You can see the hills. Kinda.” He heard Mulder’s footsteps coming across the room and didn’t move. Mulder stood at his shoulder, his reflection in the glass.

“Cool brick building you got there, too.”

Chavez nodded. “Yeah, I like it.” He realized he was holding his breath and let it out carefully, so as not to be detected. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Mulder’s reflection. Watched Mulder’s hand move, rise up and linger close to his arm.

“Dude-”

Chavez shook his head. “No, you know what? Shut up.” He turned and his arm hit Mulder’s hand and Chavez moved forward, catching his fingers in Mulder’s belt. He pressed his knuckles down, real low on Mulder’s stomach. Mulder sucked a breath in and for a moment Chavez’s hand wasn’t touching skin, and then he pressed down again.

“Just shut up, seriously,” Chavez whispered. Mulder’s eyes were big, and he nodded, without a word.

There wasn’t anything to do it on. There wasn’t anything soft in this apartment, not even something left behind just in case. They tried to pile up their clothes, but it was summertime and they weren’t wearing coats or anything. T-shirts and jeans and Chavez could feel the brass button digging into his shoulder blade. It wasn’t entirely successful.

The back of Chavez’s head got banged around pretty good on the hardwood, knots rising that he’d still be able to feel three days later. Mulder’s elbows sported blistered streaks across the skin, more painful than rug-burn. Like bathroom tile, same as that time in the hotel in Anaheim when Chavez’s knees got all fucked up like that.

It was, really, much more awkward and painful than it should have been. Chavez kept gasping in air but it was never enough, and his head slid on the floor, tipped way back to see out the window, the steady brick and the slash of sky, way high up, a pale fuzz at the corner that might have been the moon, he couldn’t tell. Mulder was heavy, pressing him down and his ribs felt crushed. Mulder’s face was all rough. Under the beer, he tasted like the gum Zito was always chewing, Extra sugar-free, still so sweet it almost stung.

Once they were done with that, they drank the last of the beers sitting side by side against the wall, under the window with their shirts off, not talking. Chavez hurt in a lot of different places.

After awhile, he pulled the crumpled envelope out of his back pocket, flipped it around in his hands a couple of times before handing it to Mulder.

“wass‘at?” Mulder asked, half-slurring and his eyelids almost closed, his head back so that Chavez could see his neck stretched out, the shape of his mouth fit against Mulder’s pulse, the dent of his shoulder.

“Rent I owe for the rest of the month. Utilities, too.”

Mulder’s eyes came open a bit more, looking angry. He tried to shove the envelope back at Chavez, but Chavez wouldn’t take it. “I don’t want it,” Mulder said. “You. Fucker. You don’t owe shit.”

He dropped the envelope between them. Chavez shrugged, his shoulders scraping on the plaster. He was pretty tired. Didn’t want to be having a fight about this right now. “Just take it, man.”

“Fuck you.”

Chavez sighed, closed his eyes and rolled his head around on his neck. He angled up to dig his hand into his pocket, groaning a little at the movement. He pulled out his keys, unhooked the key for the Alamo house off the ring. Mulder was watching him, eyes slitted.

“You can. Jesus, Eric. You can keep that, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like. I mean, you can still come around and stuff.”

Chavez flicked the key at him. It hit Mulder’s chest and slithered down to his stomach. It had to be cold on his bare skin, but he didn’t jerk or react at all.

“No, I can’t.”

He closed his eyes again. Mulder was gonna have to take something from him, eventually. His mouth felt all beer-slick and swollen. “We should get going.”

Mulder didn’t say anything. Chavez pulled his flip-flops on and got up, put his shirt back on, handed Mulder his. Mulder just sat there, looking up at him, with his T-shirt fisted in his hand and draped across his knee, the key on his stomach, silver as fish scales and gleaming dimly. Mulder’s jeans were still open, a white triangle of his shorts standing out starkly.

Chavez put his hands in his pockets and looked at Mulder down there on the floor for a long time, thinking, ‘this is my new home.’

*

Chavez dropped Mulder off the Alamo house, and Mulder looked at him curiously, feeling gun-shy when Chavez didn’t pull into the driveway or turn off the car.

“Aren’t you. Thought you were sleeping here tonight?” Mulder asked.

Chavez shook his head. He was going to Cielo Negro. Because fuck it. He’d be lucky to get there before dawn. He wouldn’t get any sleep and they had a game tonight but fuck it. “I’ll come by after the game. Pick up my stuff.”

Mulder looked out the window at their house. He sucked on his teeth, and said, “You want to, maybe,” snagging his head to the side.

Chavez swallowed. “Would you just. Get out, please.”

Mulder got out and Chavez pulled away before the door was even all the way shut, California-rolling through the stop sign at the corner, because they all knew that the cops never came around this late at night.

Mulder went inside, kicking his shoes off onto the complicated pile of sneakers in the front hallway. The TV was on in the living room, but it was switched to video for the Xbox, so it was just an uninterested gray screen. Mulder turned it off, wrapped up the controllers and took the Halo disc out of the machine, put it back in its box, and spent some time on his knees organizing the game boxes in an alphabetic row along the wall, because they didn’t have shelves this room.

He was almost asleep, and he’d had sex three times today with two different people and he should probably do what he could to make sure that didn’t happen very often anymore. It wasn’t anything he ever thought he’d be adverse to, but. It just fucking wrings him out.

He went down the hallway, shuffling until he knew for sure that the next thing he touched would jerk a static charge against his fingers. Maybe he’d touch something and it’d burst into flame. You never know. He went past Chavez’s empty room and didn’t look in, which he felt kinda proud about. Then he felt stupid for feeling proud.

Mulder yawned and opened his door. Zito was asleep in his bed, all sprawled out with one arm hanging off the side, a pillow over his head. Mulder could see a smooth length of his back, could hear Zito chewing on the sheets like he always did.

Mulder took off his shirt and jeans, folded both carefully and put them on top of his dresser. He tried to think of whose turn it was to pitch tomorrow, but for the life of him it wouldn’t come.

Zito coughed, and half-rolled over onto his side. The pillow fell off his head and his face looked calm, mouth shiny and hair all over the place.

There was this theory that Mark Mulder had never lived alone. But that wasn’t true at all.

*

The boy room, honestly, it’s not all that much. No matter how cool the light looks from one to three in the afternoon and three to four in the morning, it’s really just a small cramped back room with bad-angled walls and a hunched doorway.

He sits on the floor a lot, though there’s a couch, and a big armchair that just barely fit through the door, stuffing spilling out from a split in the seams. It’s the first time since he started playing professional baseball that Chavez isn’t living with rented furniture.

With his back against the couch, and the Playstation controller’s cord wound around his arm, Eric Chavez can sometimes squint and imagine that this is the living room of the Lafayette house, the Diablo Base house, the Alamo house, the Walnut Creek house.

He can sometimes squint and imagine that Mark Mulder is still sitting shirtless against the wall under the window, the bar of moonlight across his chest and the silver-fish key on his stomach, refusing to take anything that Chavez wants to give him.

THE END


End file.
